When Gautam Adani became India’s richest individual and the world’s third wealthiest towards the end of 2022, he shrugged off such rankings as inconsequential. The chairman of the Adani Group, a multi-billion-dollar ports-to-power conglomerate, told INDIA TODAY, “I get my thrills from handling challenges—the bigger they are, the happier I am.” Standing before him now is the biggest challenge of his career and the consequences so far have been completely unfavourable for him and the Ahmedabad-based group he has built single-handedly.
Adani Enterprises had been preparing to launch an FPO (follow-on public offer) when, on January 24, the New York-based short-seller Hindenburg Research came out with a sensational report that levelled a series of allegations against the group, including stock-market manipulation and accounting fraud. The group’s shares plummeted, eroding as much as $120 billion (nearly Rs 10 lakh crore) in investor wealth in nine group companies in a week. As on February 7, the market capitalisation of these nine companies listed on the exchanges stood at just Rs 9.8 lakh crore, nearly half their valuation two months ago. And Adani himself had slipped to 17th place on the Forbes Wealthiest list and lost his distinction as India’s richest.
He may have temporarily succeeded in stopping his shares from haemorrhaging further, but not before the steep fall cast a foreboding shadow on the future of his group and also dragged him to the centre of a massive political controversy that has put the Modi government on the mat ahead of the 2024 general election. The Opposition, spearheaded by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, charged the prime minister with favouring the businessman and called for a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) to investigate the matter (see accompanying story The Political Blowback). Concerns were also raised on the exposure of the largest public sector bank, the State Bank of India (SBI), and the largest state-owned insurer, the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), to the group, with the Opposition alleging that public money had been squandered.
On his part, the prime minister unleashed the full might of his oratorical skills in Parliament, as he lashed out at what he termed as the “ecosystem” of corruption and inefficiency that made 2004-2014 (the years of Congress-led UPA rule) a lost decade. He contrasted it with the development initiatives marking his tenure. He made
